by Erica Waters
“I will. I’ll call my public defender right now if you don’t promise me.”
“Jesse, that’s ridiculous.”
“Promise me,” he says, his voice desperate. I’ve never heard him so afraid.
What if Aunt Ena’s right, and Jesse is too? What if the fiddle . . . ? Maybe I should leave it alone.
“Fine, I promise,” I say, my voice still hesitant.
“Swear it. Swear it on Dad’s grave.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Swear it right fucking now.”
I let out an enormous sigh. “I swear. But I don’t understand why you won’t—”
“I gotta go. Someone else needs the phone. I love you,” Jesse says. Then he hangs up.
“I love you too,” I whisper to the air. Because I do, no matter what he lied about, no matter what he did. Like Mama said, that’s what you do for family. You love them and take care of them, not because they are always good or right, but because they belong to you.
Twelve
Sarah slides into the desk next to mine in history the next morning and clears her throat. “Shady.”
“Yeah?” I say without looking up. My head aches from thinking nonstop about Jesse and the fiddle. I don’t have the energy for Sarah’s hot-and-cold act today.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been a bad friend. I’m really, really sorry.”
When I finally glance at her, her face is tense and full of guilt. Her eyes search mine, desperate to see forgiveness. My anger cools just a little. Can I really hold this against her when I’ve had the same thoughts about Jesse? After all, he’s not her brother. He’s mine.
Guilt makes me more forgiving than I would have been, but I’m still not going to make it easy for her.
“What are you sorry about?” I say, making my voice hard.
“What I said about Jesse. That was messed up.” She bites her lip, and I can tell she’s fighting not to defend herself. “And I’m sorry for jumping on you about Cedar and everything. I guess—I guess I was worried you were going to bail on me, on Orlando and me, I mean.”
When I don’t say anything, she presses on. “And Orlando and I have talked about it a lot, and if you really want to play with Cedar and—and Rose, that’s fine with us. You can be in two different bands if you want to.”
“Really?” This isn’t what I expected. Surprise softens my tone, and Sarah’s voice sounds more hopeful when she speaks again.
“Yeah, or maybe—maybe we could all play together sometime. Just to see how it is.”
My mouth almost drops open. “What about Rose?”
Sarah shrugs, flashing a dimpled, embarrassed smile. “That was a long time ago.”
“I don’t know,” I say, excitement and dread swirling together inside me. A band like that is what I’ve wanted, but what about Cedar and me? Will Sarah still feel this way once she finds out there’s more to us than just music?
“But I thought this was what you wanted,” Sarah says, her smile faltering. Her brow knits, hurt showing in every line. “If playing with them is what you want . . . I—I don’t want to lose you. As a friend, I mean,” she adds hurriedly.
But her eyes say she didn’t just mean as friends.
“Okay,” I say, pushing through my confusion, my doubts. “Okay, yeah, let’s do it.”
And then she’s smiling that dimpled smile again, and the longer I look at her, the more I wish she was the one I spent last night kissing. I really like Cedar, but Sarah . . . I’ve wanted to be with her for so long.
“You want to hang out this weekend?” she asks, pretending to pick a piece of lint off her T-shirt.
If I’m staying true to my promise to Jesse and leaving the fiddle alone, I need to find something to do besides worry. And spending time with Sarah again, like things are normal, feels like the best distraction I could ask for.
“I’ll probably have to babysit, but you can come over—and Orlando. We’ll watch a movie.” Despite all the pain and doubt and anger I’ve been carrying around all week, a tiny seed of hope is bursting to life inside me. Maybe there’s still a chance for Sarah and me.
I’m still smiling when I bang through the front door after school, but then Mama looks up from the cell phone in her lap, her face filled with a brand-new grief—something besides missing Jim. My little seed of hope’s green shoots wither and die.
“What is it?” I say, my heart freezing.
Mama looks me in the eye. “I spoke to Jesse’s public defender today.”
Every last hopeful thought leaves me in a rush, like the time a boy at school punched me in the stomach and every ounce of air fled my lungs in a second, leaving me gasping on the ground, unable to draw a breath. I sink to the sofa. “What’d he say?”
“The state is offering Jesse a plea deal. If he confesses to the murder, he’ll be tried as a juvenile.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“They’ll charge him as an adult and go for the maximum prison sentence. He could spend his whole life behind bars.”
My hand goes to my mouth, thoughts already spinning through my head. “What does the public defender want him to do?”
“He thinks Jesse did it, so of course he wants him to plead guilty and take the deal. The thing is, he’d be transferred out of the juvenile center and into the adult prison as soon as he turns eighteen, so it doesn’t mean he’ll be safe.” She crosses her arms like she’s cold, but nobody’s ever cold in a trailer in Florida.
“Do you know what Jesse’s going to do?”
“If I were him, I’d probably take the deal.”
“But he didn’t kill anybody,” I say, loud. Maybe if I keep saying it loud enough, I’ll even convince myself.
“Shh, your sister’s napping,” Mama says, glancing down the hallway.
“Do you really think he could have done it, Mama?” Please say no. Please.
She closes her eyes, looking worn and ancient as the earth. “I honestly don’t know. No mother wants to believe her son could do something like that. But Jesse’s been out of my hands for a long time now. He’s angry; he can’t control himself.”
Like when Kenneth whispered something, and a thread inside Jesse snapped. Like when he punched Kenneth, over and over again, smacking Kenneth’s head against the floor.
He wasn’t like that before Daddy died. When we were kids, he was gentle and sweet. I hurt him more often than he hurt me. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the front porch of the old house crying over a skinned knee, and Jesse sitting with his arm around me, blowing on the stinging wound.
But I’ve got another image of my brother now, one I never saw but still can’t quite shake: Jesse’s hands around the handle of a hammer, his eyes wide as the metal comes arcing down.
I put my head in my hands, and the tears rise up out of me, hot and irrepressible. I’m crying for Jesse, but I’m crying for myself, too, for all I’ve lost and all I’m losing. Daddy’s death blew a hole right through our lives. What will Jesse going to prison do to us?
Mama gets out of her chair and comes to sit beside me. She puts her arm around me and lets me cry until I’m done. She doesn’t try to comfort me or tell me things are going to be okay, because she knows they won’t be. All we can do is get through everything that’s coming.
When I look up at her, her eyes glisten with tears, and I realize they aren’t for Jesse or even for herself. They’re for me, for the pain I feel. I hug her hard, and I don’t let go.
I know I promised Jesse I’d leave the fiddle alone, but sitting here with Mama, I also know there are things more important than promises.
That night, I toss and turn in bed for hours, agonizing over what’s happening to Jesse. When I finally slip into dreams, the shadow man comes too, with his freezing, choking grasp. Sometimes his face changes and he looks like Jesse, standing over me with hatred in his eyes. Twice I wake up coughing and gasping, trying desperately to take in air. After the second time, I stop trying to sleep. I climb out o
f bed and dress quietly, shivering, even though the room is warm. I go into the living room and pull on a pair of tennis shoes, lacing them with shaking fingers. While Mama and Honey sleep quietly in their beds, I let myself out the front door, into the warm spring night. Without a flashlight, I slip into the pines, following my usual path by habit.
I can’t wait around any longer for the fiddle to find me. I can’t let my doubt and my fear keep me from finding the answers that could bring Jesse home. I can’t lie in bed doing battle with my nightmares while Jesse sleeps across town, probably doing battle with worse ones.
Daddy’s done his part—now I have to do mine. I was getting distracted with Sarah and Cedar. But Jesse has to be my first priority now. I have to get him out of jail before he’s sentenced. And I don’t see any way to do that except with Daddy’s fiddle.
Thirteen
The pine woods carried the fiddle’s music to me, so that’s the only place I know to look. It’s about two in the morning, and the forest is black as pitch, the air close and clammy. Every step I take sends small animals scuttling out of my path. Wings brush my face and hair. My heart beats fast, the rush of blood in my head louder than my footsteps on the soft, springy ground.
I should be afraid, but there’s no more room in me for fear, at least not of these woods and what they hold. Losing Jesse is all I fear right now.
So I walk and walk, deeper and deeper into the woods, but I hear no fiddle, no music—not so much as the wind in the trees.
I begin to sing—the first song that comes into my head—“Ain’t No Grave,” hoping that my voice will draw the fiddle out. The words swell and fill the forest night, and chill bumps erupt on my arms.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna rise right out of the ground
Ain’t no grave can hold my body down
It’s a song about the Resurrection, but right now it feels like it’s about Daddy’s fiddle—and even buried under the ground or drowned in a lake, it can’t be silenced. I throw my voice out with abandon, letting it waken every ghost in these trees.
I sing through the song twice before the fiddle answers, sliding over my voice with a long, drawn out note. I shiver and press on through the forest, following the sound.
Moonlight filters through the trees in fits and starts, spreading like quicksilver over the shadowy ground. The fiddle plays and plays and plays, until I expect all the ghosts in the forest to grow solid around me.
The fiddle’s music builds in intensity until it’s as frenzied as the night Daddy raised the old man’s ghost, the night I realized what his music could do. My pace picks up too, until I’m running through the trees with abandon, not even worrying where I place my feet. The trees are little more than black columns, obstacles between the fiddle and me.
I run until my muscles are burning and I can barely catch a breath, and then I stumble on, unable to stop putting one foot in front of the other. The fiddle seems impatient, like it’s dragging me behind.
And then, far ahead through the gloom, the world grows bright. I break through the trees, into the open air, and the moon stretches out across the lake, turning it into an enormous reflection of itself. The sky is pricked with thousands of stars. After the darkness of the trees, it feels miraculous. I drop to my knees in the damp grass, chest heaving, breathing in the smells of mildew and lake water, grass and rotting plants.
This is where Daddy died, where his truck ran off the road and crashed into the water, killing him on impact. Where his fiddle supposedly sank and drowned, lost forever in the murky water.
The music beats against me, relentless, opening me up. I push to my feet, muscles weak and burning, and trudge down the long perimeter of the lake toward the road, where there’s a dock and boat ramp. Water fills my tennis shoes, making every step heavier. I finally reach the dock and take my shoes and socks off to let them dry. Barefoot, I walk down the dock, my eyes on the center of the lake, where the moonlight glows brightest and the fiddle music seems to have concentrated.
I drop to the dock and wait, exhausted but exhilarated, every cell of my body tuned to the fiddle’s music. The song has changed from frenzy to a low, almost unbearable wail, deep and mournful, the pain in it so evident tears burn my eyes.
The song shivers through me, an empty, aching melody I know, though I haven’t heard it in four years. I won’t find this song on Spotify or even on an old, forgotten album stashed in someone’s basement. This song was never recorded. It was never heard outside our house.
It’s one of Daddy’s songs, probably the last he composed before he died. The music itself is almost unbearable—I think it would have made even Jim weep. But the look on Daddy’s face when he played it was worse, a horrible mingling of grief and regret and rage. He played it over and over and over again in the days before he died, mostly out in the woods, but sometimes I’d catch him at it in the parlor. And then he’d look up at me but not see me, lost to emotions I couldn’t comprehend.
I understand the song better now that I’ve lost him. I hear echoes of it in my own chest. If you could distill the feeling of losing the person you love most in the world down into a single song, this is what it would sound like. Anger and despair and something like betrayal. I wonder who Daddy lost to make him write a song like that.
Now I know without a doubt that the fiddle’s here, beneath these waters, waiting for me to bring it back up. And Daddy’s brought me here, led me straight to it. I stand to my feet and strip down to my bra and underwear. My muscles are shaking with fatigue, but that’s nothing to me now.
I dive into the water the way Daddy taught me when I was a little thing, and dart through the murky depths like a fish. I let the momentum carry me far, far out into the lake before I shoot to the surface again for a breath of air. The fiddle plays on, its notes closer than ever, so close I can feel the vibration of the metal strings on my skin.
I cut through the water with swift strokes, heading farther out, until it feels like I’m inside the music, swimming in fiddle notes instead of lake water. And then, at the crisis of the song, when the highest note hangs trembling like a feather in the wind, I dive, straight down to the bottom, my eyes open but blind in the dark water. I kick harder, going deeper and deeper.
Finally, I touch the lake bottom and feel its sandy, slimy silt running through my fingertips. I reach around, searching for the fiddle case, but my hands find only what feels like dirt and weeds and rocks. I keep searching until my lungs are so starved of air I’m getting light-headed. Then I push off the bottom, rocketing back up toward the light.
When I break the surface, gulping down air, the music stops. It doesn’t even fade out like before, it simply cuts off like someone’s thrown a power switch. Now I can hear the ghosts. Their murmurs reach me from shore, a tumult of whispered voices, lonesome as the moonlight on the lake’s face. I can almost make out their words, like voices trying to press through radio static. They are troubled. Treading water, I feel suddenly how tired I am, how weak. The shore looks a thousand miles away.
One voice breaks from the throng of ghostly murmurs, a honey-gravel baritone as familiar to me as my own voice. I only catch one word—Shady—but I swim toward it, each stroke of my arms feeling like it’s going to be my last. I’m nearing the dock, my strength almost gone, when I sense something behind me in the water. A lurking, silent something.
I pause and turn my head, catching movement in the silvery water. A long, heavy body cuts slowly and sinuously through the lake. At first it’s only a shapeless mass, but then light glints off two black eyes, and a scream bursts from my mouth, scattering across the lake’s surface.
Panic floods me, but I try to remember everything Daddy ever taught me about alligators, on all the afternoons we’d see them from the dock or drifting by us in the water while we fished. There are ways to behave around alligators, but I can’t remember any of them now. Do I stay still or swim? Figh
t or flee?
Every nightmare I’ve ever had about the beasts races through my mind—finding myself in a gator-infested swamp, with hundreds of the reptiles between me and dry land. Walking by one unsuspecting, and having it lunge out of the vegetation-choked water with jagged mouth wide open. Being grabbed by one in the water and drowned in its death roll. I dreamed those dreams over and over again as a child, a recurring nightmare I couldn’t shake.
The alligator swims steadily toward me, picking up speed, and my body takes over my mind, propelling me through the water as fast as my tired limbs can carry me. I swim faster and faster and faster toward the dock, and I’m so close, so close, so close—
The gator grabs me by the leg, biting into my calf. “Daddy,” I scream, right before I’m yanked down into the water. Down, down, down, spinning through the dark. My mouth was open and now I have a mouthful of dirty lake water. I swallow it and try to hold my breath, but there’s no air left. No air, no air, no air. The pain in my calf is a distant ache compared to the burning in my chest. I’m fading.
Is this what I get for promising Jesse I’d leave the fiddle alone? I swore it on Daddy’s grave, and now I’m drowning in the place he died, my life coming to a close in the murky depths where his blood spilled out.
The police said he died on impact, so he didn’t drown, but did he feel this afraid, so afraid his terror became all that was left of him? My mind goes dark and blank and silent.
Then a melody pours through the blackness, carrying a wave of pain so strong I can coast on its back. It’s Daddy’s song again, that haunting, miserable tune that turned him from my daddy to someone strange and distant, unknowable.
A breeze blows over the water and hits my bare skin, making me shiver. And then Aunt Ena is looking down at me, her eyes wide and frightened. The melody drifts off with the breeze. I’m lying on the dock now, and I can feel every inch of my body. There is no wound in my calf. My lungs don’t even hurt.
